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Earth's Greatest Tragedy in the Making
The burning forests are only one small manifestation of the modern world's ignorance and negligence, an ignorance that may be revealed in the not-so-distant future as a tragedy unfolds of such monumental proportions that all other upheavals in the history of mankind pale beside it.
Planet Earth's greatest tragedy in the making is not so much overpopulation as many doomsayers would have us believe... most of the earth is still empty (because so many people of the land are moving to cities), but the almost total divorce of leaders, media, educators and thus the masses of the world.. from the the earth that sustains us. If the United States were indeed a wise, progressive and benevolent "leader of the world," as we like to think we are, the "American way of life" would represent to others something much different and far more noble than it does today.
How wonderful it would be if this country had remained true to the Constitution that set it apart from the rest of the world. Imagine if our leaders had confined themselves to the restraints placed on them by that Constitution, restraints that created mankind's most fertile ground ever for the nurturing of liberty and the furthering of each individual's highest aspirations. Yet, as has occured throughout history, cleverness gradually seems to displace wisdom, and luxury and convenience overshadow the basics that make them possible.
Our country, with all its potential, was the place (and still could be if we started thinking sensibly again) that could have married our truly miraculous technological advances with eternal realities. When I was a child in school, a central component of our education was a sound footing in real life. Not every child has the opportunity to learn firsthand within their family about the basis of all life and lifestyles, the farm, ranch, forest, sea and mine. So in order to educate well-balanced and reality-based students, school field trips consisted of visits to farms, ranches, meatpackers, factories, mines and mills. Today, field trips are to a zoo, a wildlife refuge or an Indian museum, all worthwhile in their place, but doing nothing to advance knowledge of the fundamentals to young people growing up in a plastic, phony, consumer-based society.
If our families, schools and leaders had continued to develop and improve knowledge of our dependency upon the earth's resources to our young people, bequeathing to them the responsibility of teaching succeeding generations better and more sustainable ways of working with nature, we would have leadership of real value to share with the world, instead of what we currently have... the "American way of life" depicting to the world millionaire movie and sports stars, vast consumption and weapons of mass destruction second to none. Unfortunately, much of the world lusts to emulate the latter "values," rather than the former.
Today, in our "cleverness," our obsession with technology and gizmos, gadgets and every kind of wondrous electronic device imaginable to the exclusion of all else, we overlook or hold in contempt the basic resources, resource production and people that make it all possible.
We are thoroughly mall-ified, the masses so far from reality, practicality and self-reliance that we are dangerous and parasitic occupants of the living earth, taking but not giving back.
We know a lot about computers and the marvelous tasks they accomplish for us. But we know nothing about the fifty minerals and metals mined from the earth to make them. We don't want to know, we just want the stinkin' mines gone. Get em' out of our sight and let the African or Chilean peasants do it. Not in my back yard and not by my kid (he's going to college to be a lawyer). Just get me my stuff.
Idiocy and hypocrisy
We know how to use paper by the truckload, but we'd rather let the poor, overcrowded forests starve, die of thirst and burn than allow a logger in to thin the forest and get our paper and building materials. Every year, the value of trees burned in wildfires on our public lands exceeds the gross domestic product (GDP) of many of the world's smaller countries. And that's not even counting the cost of fighting the fires... approaching $20 million just for the Payson and Mount Graham fires alone.
Criminal waste
And no logging company could ever begin to equal the torture and death inflicted on forest creatures by raging inferno wildfires.
(You notice you don't hear much talk about "crispy critters" from environmentalists?)
We get our meat in sterilized packages (and never give a thought to a ranch kid that helped raise it), and demand our out-of-season fruits and vegetables (and never think about the foreign peasant who worked all day in the sun to deliver it to you).
While our brains sleep, deadened by a constant onslaught of political and media brainwashing, control of the world's resources (with the help of ours and others' government policies) are steadily concentrating into a few multinational hands. In our country, multinational meatpackers control almost 70 percent of the market, up from 26 percent in 1980. Desperate Mexicans (they aren't all "coyotes" and drug smugglers) are streaming over the borders (many to work for those multinationals at the lowest price possible) because the world market has been flooded with basic commodities, underpricing the traditional regional farmers and putting them out of business. This is going on all over the world. It is going on here in the U.S., but we have various "safety nets." Most of the world doesn't. It's hard to realize here in "progressive" America, but most of the world's people have depended on agriculture throughout history and still do.
"Subsistence farming," as we contemptuously refer to it. But at least they ate. Most of the time.
Now in India, China, South America and all over, former subsistence farmers are swarming into cities, maybe eating out of garbage cans (if there are any), victims of drought, underpricing by multinationals, and high technology sucking their accessible water away for giant U.S.-like projects.
China no longer feeds itself. It has diverted its water to industry (what it hasn't lost to drought) and buys grain imports with money from American consumers. Mideastern countries have been unable to feed themselves for years. Oil money keeps them alive.
Modern society has arrogantly relegated food producers (most of the little people of the world) first, to the bottom of the food chain, now out of the food chain altogether. So, the way I see it, we don't necessarily have too many people, the world just has too many people doing nothing productive and producing more nonproductive people all the time.
In our ignorance, we've deluded ourselves that technology and education will lift all the world into something better than family farms or the "subsistence farming" that has sustained human beings throughout history. Ain't gonna happen. That's the tragedy in the making.
Payson.cc © 2004 Carrol Cox
Payson Arizona Editorial and Opinions on National USA / World / and Local News Issues